Out and about

Now-vanished East Point Hill, in the heart of Causeway Bay, contains links to two of Hong Kong's most historic corporations - Jardine, Matheson & Co and Hysan Development.

Jardine, Matheson bought extensive land holdings in East Point in 1841, shortly after Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain, and a few years later built No 1 House - the taipan's personal residence - on the summit of East Point Hill; the mansion remained a prominent local landmark until the early 1920s. Jardine's original stables stood just behind East Point Hill, on present-day Leighton Road. When the Po Leung Kuk complex - now a declared monument - was built on the site in 1931, the stables' stone entrance gate was donated to the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Re-erected at the entrance to its stables at Beas River, near Sheung Shui in the New Territories, the gates can still be seen there.

Much of East Point Hill was sold in the 1920s to Lee Hysan, a wealthy opium merchant and property developer. Lee came from Sei Yap, the 'four districts' inland from Macau, and named the streets in his new development after the districts: Sunning, Yunping, Hoiping and Sunwui. Lee quarried down the hill - the spoil was sold to the government and used for landfill on the Wan Chai-Causeway Bay reclamation project undertaken in the 1920s - and opened Lee Gardens on the site. Popularly known as Lee Yuen, two generations of Hong Kong children fondly recall this amusement park.

Numerous other developments came and went. Demolished in the early 90s, the Lee Theatre was the closest Hong Kong equivalent to the lavishly designed 'picture palaces' internationally popular in the 20s. Lee Gardens was also eventually razed - a number of times - and this corner of Causeway Bay is now one of Hong Kong's most upmarket shopping districts. Densely packed with glittering high-end stores crammed with every brand-name bauble in existence, these retail attractions prove an irresistible draw to legions of free-spending mainland visitors.

Lee Hysan was gunned down in broad daylight in a Central backstreet in 1928, not long after he won a libel suit against some business rivals. In her memoir Profit, Victory and Sharpness: The Lees of Hong Kong, Lee's granddaughter, Vivienne Poy, inferred that then-prominent Macanese business figures were responsible for the hit. While nothing was proven, highly coloured rumours and conspiracy theories have - in the classic Hong Kong manner - circulated about Lee Hysan's murder ever since.